Transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón reflected on her own mental health struggles after controversial tweets resurfaced during the peak of awards season.
Gascón, the first openly trans actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, faced an onslaught of backlash after old social media posts about George Floyd and Islam came to light.
While the “Emilia Pérez” actress repeatedly apologized for the tweets and ditched X at the time, she was mostly phased out of Netflix’s Oscar campaign, only to appear once again in public to attend the Academy Awards as a nominee.
Gascón was compelled by her daughter and “future generations” to open an “honest discussion” about mental health now that awards season is over. She looked back on “dark moments – episodes in which despair led me to unexpected places.”
“In this last episode, the most talked about and most exposed of my life, several fake accounts were created in my name to add to the pain and confusion,” she told The Hollywood Reporter of the controversy. “Absurd and even delirious accusations were thrown at me, which deeply hurt my spirit. Things escalated to a point, and so quickly, that I couldn’t even breathe.”
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“Amid this unexpected, devastating storm, there have been moments when the pain has been so overwhelming that I contemplated the unthinkable.”
“I harbored darker thoughts than those I considered in some of my previous, no less intimate and personal struggles,” Gascón said. “And I asked myself: if I, with all my strength and preparedness to deal with rage and rejection, am on the edge, what would have become of someone with fewer emotional resources to resist this onslaught? Somehow, I made it. Others would not have survived this brutal winter I am about to wrap up.”
Gascón admitted that her personal “storm” had calmed down, and “the worst has passed.”
“I’ve learned that hatred, like fire, cannot be put down with more hatred,” she said. “Offenses cannot be erased with more offenses, and mistakes cannot clean up other mistakes, especially when lies and falseness proliferate all around and when all they send back to me is pure rage, blatant bullying, vexation, scorn and even death threats.
She added, “Fortunately, I have kept my one inch of sanity to see the light at the end of this tunnel of hate and understand that I must be and do better, and correct my past faults, without engaging in more darkness. Otherwise, if I play their game, and reciprocate and amplify all that hate others project on me, I will get lost; I will never move forward, and I won’t be able to keep helping others still stuck in the storm.”
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In 2020, Gascón shared a post criticizing Islam, and wrote, “Until we ban religions that go against European values and violate human rights, such as Islam, under the protection of freedom of worship, we will not end part of the huge problem we face.”
In a post from 2020, shortly after the death of George Floyd, the performer wrote, “I really think that very few people ever cared about George Floyd, a drug addict swindler, but his death has served to once again demonstrate that there are people who still consider black people to be monkeys Without rights and consider policemen to be assassins. They’re all wrong.”
She had also criticized the Oscars in 2021, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M. Apart from that, an ugly, ugly gala.”
“Emilia Pérez” was nominated for 13 Oscars and won two awards, including Zoe Saldana for best supporting actress and “El Mal” for best song.
